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Best Torrent Apps (May/09)

i.shaun

i.shaun

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 1, 2008
784
0
Canada
There was a time when I would have answered a thread like this with "Transmission" as my app of choice, however I have recently given up on the application.


It worked flawlessly for some time, then suddenly with an update, it continuously crashed OS X, making the entire system unresponsive. I would be forced to do a hard restart by holding the power button.

I searched for a solution and discovered it was a terrible bug in an update that caused the problem. Switching to an older version I had did not seem to help, and I was out of options until they released a patch to remedy the problem.

The problem was fixed, however you could not run more than 2 torrents at a given time or it would happen again, which was fine by me. I ran only one at a time, which was more than enough to get by, but recently Transmission failed to work properly. Once again it froze OS X, and upon rebooting, froze it again not 5 minutes after running the app. I closed Transmission for good, I will completely remove it from this system and it will never come back.



What are the best OS X Torrent apps out there that you people use besides transmission? I will never use that particular app again.


I searched and found:
Xtorrent which I have never heard of before, so I assume it is new. Is it reputable ?

Tomato torrent - kind of a funny name

uTorrent - I've heard this name before.

Azureus - I think I used a similar program on windows once.
 
Xtorrent is actually old and no longer being developed (I understand), but people who use it really like it.
Azureus has tons of features but is a huge bloated pig
Utorrent is popular for windows but the OS X client is still beta and does not support all the features Windows has
Tomato torrent I have never tried.

I'm currently using Utorrent, but I find it irritiating I can set my 'stop seeding at' limit but it ignores it and just keeps seeding.
 
Eidorian said:
What's the bug?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure, I think I was on a transmission forum, people were stumped, the developers were stumped. They attempted to fix it but apparently it didn't completely stop the problem.

It just froze my OS X 3 times in a row, there is no doubt transmission is the cause of the problem.
 
akm3 said:
Xtorrent is actually old and no longer being developed (I understand), but people who use it really like it.
Azureus has tons of features but is a huge bloated pig
Utorrent is popular for windows but the OS X client is still beta and does not support all the features Windows has
Tomato torrent I have never tried.

I'm currently using Utorrent, but I find it irritiating I can set my 'stop seeding at' limit but it ignores it and just keeps seeding.
Click to expand...

haha, not sure why it would do that, but transmission did the same. Oh well, I monitor it until it reaches an acceptable level and manually stop it.
 
Transmission crashes on rare occasion, but I've never had it lockup the rest of the OS. The "stop seeding at" setting has always worked for me up to and including recent 1.60.

Before Transmission I was using Azureus. It... works well. It's very... fully featured. The interface... is crap and very slow. uTorrent is nice in Windows but I haven't tried the OS X version; if they bring it up to feature parity and performance then it should be one of the best.
 
Transmission knocks my internet out. If I start downloading on Transmission that's all the internet I get, the downloading of that specific torrent.
 
Transmission works great. I had no issues whatsoever with it. Forward properly your ports, have enough disk space and it rox :cool:
 
sideline3 said:
Transmission knocks my internet out. If I start downloading on Transmission that's all the internet I get, the downloading of that specific torrent.
Click to expand...

It's not the app.

You are taking out your internet by running torrents without limiting your uplink speed.

Do a speed test to find out how much your uplink speed is. Do not exceed say 75% of uplink speed.
 
sideline3 said:
Transmission knocks my internet out. If I start downloading on Transmission that's all the internet I get, the downloading of that specific torrent.
Click to expand...
Sounds like you need to institute some bandwidth limits. But this isn't a thread for troubleshooting.

Another client I've heard of is Bits on Wheels. Or you could try the "official" BitTorrent. Those are the only other popular ones I can think of besides those already mentioned. I suggest trying them out and seeing which works best, which has the features you need, which has the better interface (Transmission is still the only one with a GOOD UI), etc.
 
use uTorrent, i hate it for the PC, i absolutely hate it, Vuze is much better for PC's, but on Mac uTorrent trumps Transmission anyday. You'll find a lot of older Mac users on this forum will stick by Transmission till their dying day, because it was the first decent torrent client for Mac, and they dont like change, but the reality is uTorrent runs a lot smoother, uses less sytem resources, sorts out port forwarding with less hassle, and its generally faster, although thats debatable of course.

Transmission shouldn't however be locking up your whole OS, if thats happening you have a broken stick of RAM. Thats the only way your WHOLE OS could possibly be locking up.
 
XTorrent is awesome actually. It's not free, but it is really good. Hassle free and very slick. The trial caps your download speed after an hour.
 
uTorrent for Mac is horrible at the moment. It likes to jump up to use 100% of my CPU every so often, and Transmission is faster.

If you're having trouble with Transmission, download the latest nightly version.
 
alot of the mac users i know use ppc servers for their downloading so utorrent isnt an option until they sort one out. Transmission (which i used to swear by) has no disc caching (good way to chew a drive) which would make my cube harddrive come out with some funny noises:eek:

I have to stick with Azureus for now (i cant stand the name change!)
 
Wow, seems I jumped to a conclusion here. . .


Though Transmission did have a serious problem in the past, it was patched. The similar situation caused me to believe it was transmission once again responsible.


I downloaded uTorrent for OS X, and it will not execute/run. The icon pops up, and immediately quits. I figured maybe I downloaded a 10.5 BETA, so I downloaded the older BETA, and the same thing happened.

I got rid of it completely, and tried Azureus, which seemed to work well, that is until I attempted to stop/pause a transfer. Immediately iTunes started skipping, programs became unresponsive, azureus itself became unresponsibe, the system was freezing up like before, I had no choice but to do a hard restart.




It seems there is a much bigger problem at hand here that requires troubleshooting. I will see what I can do, but I may need to return here for some assistance.
 
i.shaun said:
Wow, seems I jumped to a conclusion here. . .


Though Transmission did have a serious problem in the past, it was patched. The similar situation caused me to believe it was transmission once again responsible.


I downloaded uTorrent for OS X, and it will not execute/run. The icon pops up, and immediately quits. I figured maybe I downloaded a 10.5 BETA, so I downloaded the older BETA, and the same thing happened.

I got rid of it completely, and tried Azureus, which seemed to work well, that is until I attempted to stop/pause a transfer. Immediately iTunes started skipping, programs became unresponsive, azureus itself became unresponsibe, the system was freezing up like before, I had no choice but to do a hard restart.




It seems there is a much bigger problem at hand here that requires troubleshooting. I will see what I can do, but I may need to return here for some assistance.
Click to expand...

Somethings definately wrong with your computer, Apps should start perfectly.

1) Reinstall OS X

2) Replace your RAM (i think this is the issue)
 
Consultant said:
It's not the app.

You are taking out your internet by running torrents without limiting your uplink speed.

Do a speed test to find out how much your uplink speed is. Do not exceed say 75% of uplink speed.
Click to expand...

I turn uplink off.
 
Torrents don't wear out your hard disk any more than anything else. Transmission writes data to your hard disk, and reads it to verify it's intact.
 
Many users like to be able to see the source code of the bit torrent program they are using. You can easily get Transmission source code but uTorrent is not open source.
 
is RAM really the issue?


Why would it do this only for torrent apps? Both Azureus and Transmission both do it. Either a short time after opening, or immediately after I attempt to stop a torrent or quit the app, everything freezes.


iTunes begins pausing over and over, having trouble playing, the dock may become unresponsive, other programs show "not responding", can't access the apple menu to "force quit" anything, I'm forced to hard restart.
 
OP, you are running Leopard on 15" G4 iMac? That's probably the problem, or that your current harddrive is slow and fragmented due to all the torrents over the years.

sideline3 said:
I turn uplink off.
Click to expand...

Do NOT turn uplink off. It defeats the purpose of torrents, and you'll get very slow download speed.

Users can limit the uplink speed, but should seed at least to 120% of download amount.
 
i.shaun said:
is RAM really the issue?


Why would it do this only for torrent apps? Both Azureus and Transmission both do it. Either a short time after opening, or immediately after I attempt to stop a torrent or quit the app, everything freezes.


iTunes begins pausing over and over, having trouble playing, the dock may become unresponsive, other programs show "not responding", can't access the apple menu to "force quit" anything, I'm forced to hard restart.
Click to expand...

You could try repairing disk permissions, and also verifying your hard disk, you can do both of these in the Disk Utility
 
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